Thelma and Louise on the road to freedom

Set in the late 40s, but not published until 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the beat generation’s seminal celebration of the joys of roadside America. Fast cars, whisky, women, a few, last, soiled dollars – the hipster’s journey was the pleasure principle on wheels. His heyday was the 50s. Then the car transformed the American landscape and the populuxe population motored on in aerodynamically styled cars ready for lift off, as General Motors continued to displace public transport with its “dynamic obsolescence”.

Years after Kerouac’s death, the road remains a favourite idiom, whether of an aging beat such as Robert Frank, a middle-aged enfant such as David Lynch or the scout Jim Jarmusch. And even if America’s road network has now been reduced to an endless tangle of freeways and concrete clovers – closer to J. G. Ballard’s apocalyptic Crash than to Kerouac’s literary joyride – the myth endures. It certainly fuels Ridley Scott’s new film, Thelma and Louise, the story of two women friends on the run for killing a rapist. But unlike its innumerable siblings, this film doesn’t just recycle an idiom, it rewrites the road movie, custom-fitting it to female specifications.

The road defines the space between town and country. It is an empty expanse, a tabula rasa, the last true frontier. Its myth echoes down the history of US cinema, from films such as Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) to Robert Altman’s remake, Thieves Like Us, shot nearly thirty years later.

The road trip is always a male trip and the road movie makes literal the rite of passage that Oedipally-driven narratives demand of their male heroes. If a woman hops a ride with a man, the journey, perfumed with a female sexuality, breeds danger and violence rather than pleasure.

Motherhood tempers the femme fatale, as in You Only Live Once, but severed from the domestic sphere, as in Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands, women appear to provoke rituals of frenzied violence. For women who travel alone, the stakes are somewhat modified. They either end up victim to violence, as in Psycho – the ultimate bad trip – or land in a fringe subgenre, such as the women’s prison film Untamed Youth or biker film She-Devils on Wheels.

Veering off from the mainstream, Thelma and Louise has two women travelling the road together. But what explicitly separates this film from the generic chaff, making it more than a case of incidental cross-dressing, is the distinctive means by which the road to the self is travelled. In short, Thelma and Louise become outlaws the moment they seize control of their bodies. Theirs is a crime of self-defence, their bandit identities forced on them by a gendered lack of freedom, their journey grounded in the politics of the body. In a culture where the female body is traded, circulated in a perverse exchange, for a woman to seize power over her body is still a radical act.

The contrast with the sexual politics of three other road movies – Joseph Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1949), Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986) and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) is revealing. In Lewis’ peripatetic amour fou, the antihero, Bart Tare, is taken on a violent psychosexual spree through his dual obsession with guns and his lover, Annie Laurie Starr. In this film noir, the journey to manhood begins and ends in the pastoral milieu of youth, but is thrown off course by the relentlessly sexual woman. Brutal and explicitly non-maternal, Annie wilfully uses desire to pitch the couple into a fevered criminality that forces them on to the road. As in the earlier The Postman Always Rings Twice (a road movie with low mileage), the woman’s body and the road are interchangeable, sites each man must travel – as if against his will – to certain destruction.

In Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, a white yuppie’s cross-country trip is the stuff of existential heroics, a search for self that pivots on his taming of a ‘wild’ white female body in soulful Africana drag. Over the course of the fugitive couple’s journey, Demme’s heroine transforms from Lulu into Audrey, a metamorphosis that has her replace red lipstick, black wig and African accoutrements for blonde hair and a virginal white dress. It’s a transformation that, as if to assuage the troubling teleology, Demme simultaneously parallels with a retinue of ‘positive’ blackness – homeboy, churchgoing folks, a singing cowboy.

If Demme’s vision embraces a well-intentioned liberalism, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is its reactionary adjunct. A road film jerry-rigged as a post-modern Wizard of Oz, Wild at Heart is peopled with the director’s routine obsessions – anomalies (physical and otherwise), sadistic cruelty, sex crimes. Lula Fortune and Sailor Ripley, young lovers on the run, are on the “yellow brick road” of freedom and erotic escapade, trying to put distance between them and Lula’s crazy mama, a woman obsessed with controlling her daughter and imagined as the Wicked Witch of the East incarnate.

Lula’s body is already conquered before the film begins (she was raped as a teenager). It’s a frontier that remains only to be explored, ravaged and eventually domesticated – by motherhood and marriage, no less. As in Something Wild, the woman’s body is contested terrain, but the conflict here is more insidious. In Wild at Heart the struggle over Lula and the journey are launched by the death of a black man, whose brains are beaten out by Sailor within the film’s first minutes. Later, in yet another grotesque tableau, a white woman screams “fuck me” to a black man who pulls the trigger on a white man sandwiched between them.

Fear of miscegenation stalks this movie, from one death to another. This land is your land, this land is my land – but hands off the white women. Property is a constitutional right, and Sailor is a man whose sense of proprietary privilege is as baroque as his snakeskin jacket, which, as he reminds Lula, is “a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom”.

As if in direct reply to this tradition, in which white supremacy is the unspoken subtext, a key scene in Thelma and Louise has a black Rastafarian cycling incongruously into the picture. Thelma and Louise have robbed a highway patrolman of his gun – a symbolic castration – and locked him in his car trunk. The stormtrooper-turned-crybaby wiggles a small, white, very wormy finger through an airhole after the women leave, only to have the Rasta blow back the exhaust of his spliff in reply. The American landscape has ceased to be the exclusive province of white masculinity.

While Thelma and Louise doesn’t pretend to remedy a heritage of oppression, it does make tracks as a feminist road movie. And what sweetens the equation further is that it is also a Western, retooled with .45s not Winchesters, ‘66 T-Birds not pintos. Thelma and Louise embody classic Western archetypes, with a twist. Thelma is simple and sweet, childlike and unworldly. She’s the woman John Wayne kisses goodbye in the Red River prologue, Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return, and again, later and sadder, in The Misfits. Louise is tough and knowing, a saloon gal like Dietrich’s Destry or Julia London in Man of the West. “Not this weekend, sweetie”, jokes Louise to a male co-worker about Thelma, “she’s running away with me”. What begins as the women’s retreat from masculinity, a weekend slumber party, ends up an adventure of girlfriends, guns and guts.

Thelma and Louise may leave town all smiles, Dolly Parton denim and lace, but their getaway turns ugly as soon as they leave home. At their first stop Thelma is assaulted in a parking lot by a man with whom she’s casually danced and flirted. The film declares its intentions the moment Louise interrupts the rape, answering the order to “suck my cock” with a bullet through his chest. Unlike Wild at Heart, this frontier isn’t open to exploitation. When the women hit the road a second time, they’re not on vacation from men, they’re running from the law – not just the Pinkertons or J. Edgar Hoover, but the law of the father.

In contrast to Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise’s crime isn’t murder, it’s subjectivity. What’s at stake in Thelma and Louise is paternal authority, whether it’s a rapist named Harlon, Thelma’s noxious husband, or the father-like Hal. In True Grit and The Silence of the Lambs, strong female characters lean on, or learn from, men. In Thelma and Louise women look to each other to survive.

Within the usual terms of gender, it’s a maxim that feminine desires are equated with passivity and masculine with action, a truism Scott’s film upends. It’s this familiar logic that frames the proverbial pioneer woman in the cabin doorway and fixes Pretty Woman’s Hollywood hooker for romantic conquest on her tenement fire escape. The same formula finds Thelma a dizzy housewife married to a domineering carpet salesman. “He’s your husband, not your father”, Louise reminds her friend. Down the road, Thelma repeats this homily to her husband in a telephoned declaration of independence and a life reborn.

Unlike films that submit women to a spurious transvestitism (such as Blake Edward’s Switch), the changes in Thelma and Louise are more than merely cosmetic. As in Something Wild, clothing is saturated with meaning, but where Demme’s Lula strips away the ‘exotic’ to get at the essence, trading danger for gentility, black for white, Thelma and Louise are designing a different paradigm.

Louise swaps all her jewellery – including an engagement ring – for a white cowboy hat, while Thelma sports a black T-shirt that features a smiling skull and the legend “Drivin’ my life away”. But there’s more to these outlaws than butch get-ups, more than whimsy at stake when Louise tosses her lipstick in the dirt. The physical transformations parallel the women’s wild rush down the American road. At each state border they cross, another boundary – both ontological and literal – is transgressed. In Thelma and Louise, homicide and mayhem pale in comparison to the implications of the friendship of women.

In much the same way as Demme clutters his roadside America with white kitsch and negritude, Scott trots out a miscellany of masculinity. “Fill her up”, orders Louise to a gas-station attendant, ignoring the testosterone-swelled Michelin man who pumps iron nearby. Cowboy, outlaw, lawman: registers of masculine identity circulate in Scott’s frame. There’s Thelma’s boorish husband, Daryl, who makes her a football widow; the women’s cowboy lovers, J.D. and Jimmy; Hal, the friendly Arkansas chief of police and benign exception to unjust law – leading men relegated here to supporting roles.

A touring musician, Jimmy is the new-age cowboy with the seductive sulk of crooner Chris Isaak, while J.D., with his ten-gallon hat and twitching hips, is the sexual outlaw of Giant and Badlands – the film’s lone camera movement across a human body is reserved for Thelma’s gaze at the rippled muscles of his belly. Men are signposts along this freaky female trip – the good, the bad and the ugly, each suggesting a different heterosexual possibility, a potential refuge or threat.

From Easy Rider through Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Midnight Run, men in the buddy movie have a relationship in order to develop their individual autonomy. In contrast, Thelma and Louise forge an alliance that isn’t based on joint narcissism and private prerogative – or the competing favours of men. It is most vividly realised in a scene in which the women rip through the night, dwarfed by a landscape of red buttes and mesas. Dramatic and imposing, this is the classic frontier tableau, the one eternally associated with John Ford’s most memorable Westerns. It’s the image that opens Thelma and Louise, when nostalgia – laden black and white – gives way to vivid colour, an iconic reference to a celluloid landscape as familiar as Lincoln’s craggy profile on a nickel. It’s the panorama that at a glance invokes the place where women are at once domesticated and uncivilised – as in Stagecoach, both the mother and the whore – and where the land, like women, is both good and bad, bountiful and punishing, wild and tame.

It’s amid the buttes and mesas, a visual cue for Ford’s Monument Valley, that Thelma and Louise mark one of the film’s most intimate moments. As Marianne Faithfull’s ravaged voice fills the air with ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, Thelma and Louise trade swigs of Wild Turkey: “At the age of thirty-seven, she realised she’d never ride through Paris in a sportscar with the warm wind in her hair”. Later, parked at the side of the road, the women stand in silence to watch the dawn break, the fiery orange of the sun, the red ochre buttes and their matching scarlet hair in startling concert.

In clumsier hands the moment could sink into murky essentialism. But in Thelma and Lousie the issue isn’t woman as nature, but women in nature. Here, the female body is not a landscape to be mapped, a frontier under conquest. This is the liberated body, but, as well, the body of empathetic connection. In the absence of men, on the road Thelma and Louise create a paradigm of female friendship, produced out of their wilful refusal of the male world and its laws. No matter where their trip finally ends, Thelma and Louise have reinvented sisterhood for the American screen.

Bloated and alcoholic, Jack Kerouac died a recluse nearly twenty years after he wrote his most famous book. So much for the giddy masculine promise of On the Road. Route 66 has been closed, Detroit all but shuttered. And these days the US government wages war for the oil that feeds its automotive addiction.

In Thelma and Louise the history of the American road movie is filtered through a revisionist lens. It’s as if step-by-step, Thelma and Louise retrace the familiar routes, but with the will to pleasure, not power. Tired scenarios and cliched landscapes alike are reinvented, resuscitated with fresh perspective and never-before-told lives. On this trip, when women drive, Oedipus spins out of control.